Streamline Your Budget With These Excel Shortcuts

There are plenty of awesome online tools to help you manage your budget, but there's nothing wrong with good, old-fashioned Excel, either. And these shortcuts can help make your spreadsheet budgeting a little easier.

GOBankingRates breaks down eleven Excel shortcuts for easier budgeting. Here are a few highlights.

Goal Seek is great for budgeting projections. As GOBankingRates puts it, you can estimate "what-if" scenarios.

For example, you might want to calculate the minimum mortgage payment needed in order to pay off a loan at a given interest rate in a given period. In this way, Goal Seek can help you budget appropriately for repayment

Concatenate lets you combine two or more cell values. This way, you can see all info in one place:

For example, you might have a list of expense items in one column and a list of due dates in another. Using the concatenate function, you can combine information from multiple cells into one cell and present the item and due date together.

VLOOKUP lets you link and search for specific values in your database based on its corresponding value. According to Office, it's sort of like looking up someone's name in a phone book to find their phone number. Here's a specific budgeting example GOBankingRates offers:

For example, you might keep a list of your earnings for one year on one spreadsheet and earnings for the previous year on a separate sheet. If you want to find out how much you earned each year in January, the VLOOKUP function can find that information for you and enter that data wherever you specify.

GOBankingRates elaborates on these and lists a handful of other useful functions, so be sure to check out the full article at the link below.

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